An early ish start we hired a few bicycles and set off with a map and a few directions to the national park of Con Dao Island. After about 1/2 an hr we found the ticket office for the national park and were given our free tickets 😊 then carried on another 10 mins to the bottom of 1 of the mountains, leaving our bikes and setting off into the rain forest to So Ray Plantation. We followed a rough path up, through dense and very humid forest, hearing wildlife around us but not able to see anything, which was a bit eerie 😮 It only took us just under an hour to reach the old plantation where we found some disused buildings and a look out tower which we went up to giving us views onto the town and southern part of the island. After a little rest and water we headed back down and started spotting the wildlife around us which included a few lizards that were about a foot long with a reddish under belly and 'The Black Giant Squirrel' which at first I thought was a monkey! Further down we heard some bigger rustling in the forest and louder noises, we waited for a while and then we saw a few monkeys coming out from the forest followed by the rest of their big family which turned out to be about 14 with baby monkey's!! 🙉😀 They happily grazed on the leaves right in front of us, climbed the trees, slept and the little ones played - it was amazing! After about 20 minutes we forced ourselves to leave them and carried on back down to find our bikes.
Back on our bikes we headed on to the other side of the island to find Ong Dung beach. Unfortunately most of it was up hill which became exhausting in the heat, well for me and ended up walking a little bit - Emma carried on a bit more before giving in to a walk! Anyway, we got to the top of the beach and made our way down several steps and found a big shallow stoney bay to ourselves with a hut and bench under the trees where we had our picnic. Unfortunately by the hut there was a small tank with a turtle in - there was a little note on the tank saying it was called lucky because it was born deformed with 5 flippers. So they 'saved' the turtle and were keeping it safe in the tank - hmmmm, I'd say that's not so lucky! 😞 If it wasn't for a few locals in the hut I would have been very tempted to get the poor thing out and put back in the sea and let nature take its path. Anyway, we had a little paddle then back on our bikes - downhill this time with dodgy breaks!!!!!😕
We returned safely back to our bungalow and went into the sea for our first sea swim of the trip 😀 Cool, but not cold, very nice! It's very windy on this island so the sea on our side was a little rough but good fun to play in for a bit. A great end to a super day 😀
